I think if God could, He would grab each of
us by the shoulders, look deeply into our eyes, and press into us His earnest
answer to that question! Let Him do that now. Still your weary mind, open your
yearning heart to His leading, and listen to a story . . .

A boy was born in March 1906. His mother
died before his tenth birthday. His father was a soldier and a miner. Young
Adolf (not the one you’re thinking of)
never did graduate from high school but instead helped at the mine and worked
as a mechanic and traveling salesman. A friend suggested he join a rising
political group with career opportunities. Adolf Eichmann was eventually
promoted through the ranks, becoming a top SS official in Nazi Germany. He
directed the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of millions of Jews,
determinedly working toward his boss’s “Final Solution.”

After the fall of Hitler, the victorious
Allied armies hunted this notorious war criminal, but the soldiers who arrested
him under a false name did not realize he was Eichmann and thus took no special
measures to hold him. The mass murderer was able to escape, hiding first in
Germany and then in Italy. Some priests helped him get Red Cross paperwork for
Argentina, and he eventually blended into Buenos Aires society.

But he wasn’t the only European who moved
to Argentina after the war. So did a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who had
suffered under Eichmann, and whose daughter had unknowingly—due to an
alias—befriended Eichmann’s son. When her father discerned the man’s true
identity, Israeli intelligence swooped in, smuggled Eichmann out of Argentina,
and set him before the world in a dramatic Jerusalem trial (1961), eventually
hanging him.

During that trial, many expected to see on
the witness stand a crazed killer, a flailing megalomaniac. Eichmann was, after
all, a mass murderer!
Millions died unspeakable deaths, the ovens and gas chambers were busy, at his
hands! He oversaw the herding of humans into those awful trains . . . and was
not moved to guilt or compassion, not even when all was recounted during the
trial!

What the world saw, instead, was a commonplace
man—he looked like anyone’s balding uncle—who had most recently been an
Argentine factory foreman, daily riding the bus to and from work and bringing
flowers to his wife on their recent twenty-fifth anniversary. In other words,
he was ordinary.

Did he deny the heinous crimes? No, he only
denied guilt, because he was merely “following orders.” This was the same alibi
given by Nazi war criminals at the earlier Nuremberg trials and now called the
“Nuremberg Defense.” (A powerful film on this topic, Judgment
at Nuremberg, stars Spencer Tracy.)

One Jewish website1 I checked
claimed Eichmann was not even anti-Semitic, just bureaucratic. He was, in his
mind, simply a good citizen going with the national flow. This morally exempted
him, he felt.

A German-Jewess and political theorist,
Hannah Arendt, who had escaped to America, witnessed and wrote about Eichmann’s
trial . . . and this is what we want to specifically consider as homeschoolers.
“She coined a phrase, ‘the banality of evil’ to describe Eichmann,” explaining
that it stems from “thoughtlessness—the tendency of ordinary people to obey
orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the
results of their action or inaction.”2

As, the Psalmist would say . . . Selah!Stop and think what this means! Most
people assume that such blind, unthinking obedience as Eichmann’s, such a
personal disconnect from moral responsibility, could happen only under duress
and to someone else somewhere
else, such as in Nazi Germany under the spell of an orator like Hitler, during
the post-World War I chaos that helped him grasp power.

But is that true? Is it rare for people
to do automatically and unthinkingly what their culture teaches them . . . in the glaring face of common sense, the
lessons of history, and God’s own truth? Or is it common? Is it so common that
we do it ourselves (even in our parenting and homeschools) without realizing
it?

I already know the answer in my own life,
but that doesn’t carry much weight. Let’s look instead at the unforgettable
experiment—triggered by Eichmann’s trial—carried out by an American professor
who wondered the same. Dr. Milgram asked local volunteers to “help with
important memory studies” by “testing” people’s recall. They would be
“teachers” and give electrical shocks to “learners” who failed to remember
correctly. However, the “teachers” were the real
subjects of the experiment, because the “learners” were part of the setup. They
only pretended to forget and then pretended to feel painful shocks.

The stunning and disconcerting result of
the experiment was that most ordinary
townsfolk kept right on administering ever-stronger shocks—even a deathly
450-volt blast—over the pleading cries of the “learners,” their fellow
townspeople! Why? Because theywere calmly told to do so by a single man in a lab
coat.

The “teachers” had no grudge. They’d never
been harmed by the “learners.” They’d never even met! Nor did the “learners”
act or look threatening. Yet, the “teachers” were willing to torture and
possibly kill these innocent neighbors—right before them—all so they could
avoid resisting the program and could gain approval from the scientist! They
wanted to be sure they hadn’t become noticeable by rocking the boat, so they
did not analyze the difference between their
beliefs and their actions.

These “teachers”—like Eichmann—were
ordinary. They had not earlier been killers. But once the “expert scientist”
endorsed a “plan,” it easily
overpowered their own moral beliefs! And this occurred back in the 1960s, when
the United States was more characterized by Judeo-Christian values!

So, if we have long wondered why so many ordinary
German people (when there were churches in every town square and the German
education system was considered academically successful) hunted their Jewish
neighbors, helped load the trains, and fired up the gas chambers . . .

If we have long noted that Hitler would
have been just a lonely maniac if millions of people had not cooperated with
him . . .

Then we must also
ask how average American townsfolk (in Milgram’s experiment) could believe they
were electrocuting their neighbors, and continued to do so, under the influence
of a single, soft-spoken authority figure!

If it is common, then, to succumb to an
“expert with a plan,” we should also ask ourselves
if we have unwittingly allowed our current post-Christian culture to tell us
“how things are done.” Every day, the confident “talking heads” sell us their
latest cure-alls and super-systems.

For example, who has defined “education”
for us? Have we—without thinking—duplicated the educational methods, locations,
goals, schedules, and philosophies of the world around us? Or have we really
pressed into God for His
definition of education?

The pre-World War German schools may have looked
impressive, but John Gatto says they were actually designed to inhibit deep
thinking, instead implying that an abundance of academic factoids was true
education.3 This was a passive education, not an active one. It
promoted the culture’s own values, rather than showing through
every academic subject that God’s truths alone free and
prosper mankind. Hopefully, this is not the style of your children’s education,
for when the German population was asked to passively accept Hitler’s cruel
extremes, many did so. They were unthinking clay in the hands of the “experts.”

Likewise, who has defined “family life” for
us? Who said that Father and Mother and Children should be separated all day?
What does the nature of all aspects
of our daily lives, finances, entertainment, politics, time investments, etc.,
reveal about the influences we accept?

The good news is that once we—the lovers of
the Lord—lock onto His truths, we hold to them relentlessly. Let’s just be sure
to probe His principles for parenting and education too! We cannot be
Eichmann-like ourselves, even if that is human nature. We cannot passively and
unthinkingly apply the same secular educational method we experienced as
students. We cannot be, like Eichmann, mere “bureaucrats” in our homeschools,
mindlessly enforcing the secular goals of our post-Christian culture.

You and I have a mighty purpose! We are
called to raise children whose spiritual and academic education is totally
God-defined and unique to each family. We have all day, every day, and every
“subject” to reveal the Lord so powerfully to our kids that they can withstand
the subtle authority of the culture, but we must do so first . . .

Michelle is a veteran homeschooler,
founder/operator of a large homeschool library, columnist for a homeschooling
magazine, and speaker on education/history, including interviews on Moody
Radio’s Prime Time America
program. Her history curriculum, TruthQuest
History, is one of Cathy Duffy’s 100 Top Picks
for Homeschool Curriculum and has won numerous awards (www.TruthQuestHistory.com).
Michelle earned a B.A., summa cum laude,
from the University of Alabama.
She and John have four children and five cute grandsons!

Endnotes:

1. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/eichmann.html

2. www.ask.com/wiki/Hannah_Arendt?qsrc=3044

3. Gatto, John. “Confederacy of Dunces.”
Complete publication details of this article unknown; I was handed a photocopy
that did not include citations.

Copyright 2011, used with permission.
All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the trade magazine for homeschool
families. Read the magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com or read it
on the go and download the free apps at www.TOSApps.com to read the magazine on your
mobile devices.

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